Devansh Desai

Student | Software Engineer

University of Pittsburgh CS

About Me

Hello! I'm Devansh Desai and I am a 4th year undergraduate computer science student at the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA. I'm also a passionate, driven software engineer who enjoys working in all areas of the field and solving challenging, complex problems.

Résume

This is my education and work experience
timeline. All of my past work is explained here.

Amazon.com

Software Development Engineer Intern

Seattle, WA

Worked on the Search team and created and implemented a system to stream, store, and search through 150 TB of weekly logs associated with all of the search queries on Amazon.com

Cut down on-call debugging time searching through logs from hours to minutes

Using AWS tools such as Kinesis, S3, Lambda, and Elasticsearch Service, the system was horizontally scalable, allowing for more logs to be streamed and stored, seamlessly, with little maintenance required

Advanced Data Management Technologies Laboratory

Undergraduate Researcher

Pittsburgh, PA

Implemented a self-guided campus tour web application for the University of Pittsburgh using Bluetooth beacons

Created the application to guide prospective students through campus with a campus tour using the beacons while current students can get information such as availability of computer labs, laundry machines, and classrooms
in the buildings

FTI Consulting

Software Engineering Intern

Pittsburgh, PA

Developed features across the stack on an agile team in SQL Server, middle-tier C#, and in the front-end Ext JS MVC
framework

Guardian Life Insurance Company of America

Web Development Intern

Bethlehem, PA

Recreated an intranet for 150+ customer service representatives to quickly and intuitively access customer data, procedures, and guidelines while on the phone with customers

Used HTML, CSS, jQuery, PHP, and SQL Server

University of Pittsburgh Technology Services

Student Technical Consultant

Pittsburgh, PA

Worked in the Computing Services & Systems Development (CSSD) department

Helped students and professors in software related issues with their computers.

Split between helping at the University Bookstore and on-location in students' rooms

University of Pittsburgh

Student

I currently attend the University of Pittsburgh in Pittsburgh, PA. I study computer science and intern as a software engineer during my summers.

I hold a 3.74/4.00 GPA and a 3.88/4.00 CS GPA. I have also made the Dean's List in all of my semseters at the university.

Parkland High School

Student

I attended Parkland High School in Allentown, PA where I graduated with a 4.56/5.00 GPA and was part of the top 3% of my class.

Projects

These are some of the projects I have worked on in the past.

ReddiTray

ReddiTray is a desktop tray application that notifies you when you have unread Reddit messages and allows you to read your messages and mark them as read. It is a complete, stand-alone solution for Reddit messages without the
need of the traditional web browser.

ReddiTray is built on GitHub Electron and Node.js. It also uses Vue.js, the Reddit API, Snoocore, and Marked.js.

Dhirana Website

Dhirana is a University of Pittsburgh non-profit organization that raises funds for the Birmingham Free Clinic. It brings in $10,000+ each year through hosting a national Indian classical dance competition where 8 teams from
all over the United States compete for 1st place.

I served as the Design Chair for the organization for two year and I made the website, logos, numerous flyers, and over 10+ promotional videos for Dhirana 2015 and 2016.

Phone Snake

Phone Snake is a game I created to explore the HTML canvas. I wanted to do something like snake but with a twist. The objective is to successfully enter your phone number. There are three difficulties: easy, medium, and hard.

Even I haven't beat the game on hard, click the link below and see if you can!

Kobuki Robot

In my Programming System Design on a Mobile Robot Platform class during the fall of my second year, I worked in a team of two on various interesting projects with the Kobuki robot. The class was composed of only projects so for
the whole semester, my partner and I worked extensively in Python to make the robot do cool things.

Project 1 was called Sennott Square Rover. My partner and I were required to be able to SSH to the robot a single command or a series of commands for movement (ie. Forward 2 meters, Right 90°, ...). We
had to account for wheel slippage by creating an algorithm that would gradually accelerate the robot for any distance input.

In Project 2, Soccer Kick, the task was to use the webcam of the laptop mounted on the robot to follow a colored line on the ground and to make sure that during a sharp turn, the robot would not go off
of the line. Then, the robot had to scan the environment through the webcam for a red ball and then an orange goal. Using only three linear movements, the robot had to kick the ball into the goal. This project required figuring
complex similar triangles to cover all cases of the ball and the goal's location. The ball and goal could be placed anywhere in relation to robot and in order to successfuly execute the kick, our algorithm had to be robust
enough to cover all edge cases.

Project 3 was called Selfie Bot and it incorporated a Microsoft Kinect. The robot was to follow a person
around the building automatically using only colored construction paper on cardboard. Using the Kinect, the robot recognized the color pattern on the cardboard and also the distance to the person to decide whether to move forward,
backward, or turn and how fast. On the other side of the cardboard, there was another pattern. If the robot saw this pattern, it would start a countdown and at 0, it would take a selfie of the user.

Project 4 was called DJ Roomba and the idea for it was mine, inspired by the TV show Parks and Recreation.
Essentially, the robot was to move randomly throughout the building and play music. For the class, this was too simple so I decided to incorporate voice recognition. Using the Google Speech Recognition API and the Spotify Web
API, my partner and I recreated DJ Roomba with a modern twist. We could say "Mr. Data" (the robots name) and "play artist ..." and the robot would stop, recognize the command, play a random song from the top 20 results of the
artist on Spotify, and then continue moving about. Another command was playing a specific song by an artist.

Allenwood Motel Website

I made this website for Allenwood Motel, a client in Allentown, PA. This was my first client as a freelance web developer. I used the Bootstrap framework to make the website fully-reponsive and mobile-ready.

Etch-A-Sketch

Etch A Sketch is a recreation of the popular children's toy. I created the game to complete a JavaScript challenge I found online. There are a few more features than the original Etch-A-Sketch like colored lines, detailed lines,
and changing the resolution.